Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: new name, long history

While violence-induced psychological trauma has no doubt been
around since the days of mastodons and stone-age warfare, the term
"post-traumatic stress disorder" was only added to the lexicon of
the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.

In the Civil War, it was known as "exhaustion" and "soldiers
heart." More than 44,000 British troops were diagnosed with
"chronic fatigue" in World War I and retired from the military
because they were unable to function in combat, according to the
Web site ptsdmanual.com. In World War II it was called "shell
shock," and "combat fatigue." And in the aftermath of the Vietnam
War it was referred to as "post-Vietnam syndrome."

The National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a
division of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, says the
disorder is defined by a trauma or terrible event and each person's
reaction to it with feelings of fear, helplessness or horror.

What made the identification and definition of the condition
important was that it established the cause of the disorder as
something outside the victim -- and not something caused by
inherent weakness in the individual, according to the center.

Since the condition was clearly defined 26 years ago,
researchers have learned that the condition -- which can be caused
by war, torture, rape, genocide, assault, severe accidental and
violent trauma, as well as natural and man-made disasters -- is
relatively common, afflicting 10 percent of women and five percent
of men in the United States, according to the center's Web site,
www.ncptsd.va.gov/.

In 1989, Veterans Affairs inaugurated the National Center for
PTSD, following a Congressional mandate that the agency do
something to meet the needs of veterans who were suffering from the
disorder. The agency seeks to provide information to veterans on
the disorder and to "advance the clinical care and social welfare
of America's veterans through research, education, and training in
the science, diagnosis and treatment of PTSD and stress related
disorders."